Conversation with Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism is Great! and owner of a shirt that everyone coveted.
Until recently, there was no word in Chinese to describe fans because there were no celebrities. “We have one now. They are called ‘glass noodles’,” says Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism is Great. The 44-year-old Zhang gets wedding proposals from strangers abroad enamoured by her face, but has no fans in China. Her book is unlikely to ever be sold in China, just as she’s unlikely to practice her journalism with a Chinese newspaper. “When the International Herald Tribune carried a review of my book, every copy of the paper sold in China had the review cut out,” says Zhang calmly.
Zhang’s funny and intense memoir covers fresh ground in a market full of Chinese memoirs. Growing up in the 1980s, Zhang was witness to the massive social changes China went through. Her mother, worn-out by decades of work, vetoed her desire to become a linguist and picked her as replacement breadwinner.
Zhang was heartbroken to leave school and went to work. But even in the closely-policed environment of the factory, Zhang remained irrepressible. She taught herself English and resisted mind-numbing propaganda. Often, Zhang’s description of the absurd rules that hedged young women reminds you of Marjane Satrapi’s stories of her return to Iran as an adult. In the funniest sequence in Persepolis 2, Satrapi describes policemen in Tehran admonishing her for running after a bus because the movement of her hips would tempt men.
“For a decade, I was not given a promotion because my hair is curly,” Zhang says. She breaks down this baffling statement. Few Chinese have Zhang’s curly hair. Zhang’s bosses assumed she had a perm and hence had bourgeois leanings. The factory’s ‘period’ police notwithstanding, Zhang went on to have sexual and political adventures that led her very far from the ‘iron bowl’ — her mother’s guaranteed income. Zhang’s strong sense of self and desire for a wider world fuelled her through the years. Ironically, Zhang sees no discrepancy in criticising younger Chinese women for their selfabsorption. “They have more opportunities but they are not interested in anything serious.” And it is true that Zhang has an ardency that colours even her jokes about looking for zipless love. As a young woman, Zhang may have rebelled by enjoying fashionable clothes, a pursuit that today’s Chinese couture bloggers would empathise with. But Zhang also organised the biggest demonstration among workers in her hometown in support of the Tiananmen Square protest.
After some years abroad, Zhang returned to Beijing. At first she helped foreign journalists with their research, but quickly grew tired of them not getting things right. As a journalist, she began to write about issues such as capital punishment. “Chinese newspapers are not allowed to publish even the data of how many people have received the death sentence in a year.” Her working class past had become invisible over the years. Her colleagues were startled to learn that she had started her working life as a teenager in a weapons’ factory. It was at their urging that she began her memoir. Her first novel, Lotus, is due later this year.
Today, Zhang enjoys her community of writers and politically-active friends. She travels for work and fun, but continues to be a close observer of people and the state. Zhang pours scorn on Westerners who raise Tibet as China’s biggest crime. “These Americans romanticise everything about Tibet. Tibet is such a complex issue. Did they know what conditions Tibetans lived in before China came along?” she says. “The Olympics is the best thing that happened to us. It made ordinary Chinese people feel assertive — as if their country is on the world map.” Such a need seems at complete odds with outsiders’ paranoia about China’s growth.
“I can understand why people are afraid of China’s growth but I think the solution is to integrate China into the world community, not to isolate us.”
Paul Zacharia once wrote of a tired, doubt-wracked Jesus wandering out of the desert, afraid to look into a mirror and see that he was the Messiah. Zacharia’s tender, vulnerable Jesus enraged the church and those who love sending death threats to writers.
Zacharia, too, is coming out of a desert. For nearly a decade, major magazines in Kerala have refused to publish his stories. Defiantly, Zacharia continued to work eight hours a day, writing hundreds of columns, dozens of short stories. And now he has tried his hand at a new form — the novel — for its scale and possibilities. He has been working simultaneously on a novel in English and another in Malayalam. Why the novel in English? “I wanted to tell Malayalees to b****r off,” says Zacharia, only half-joking.
Zacharia does not believe he is the Messiah, but he has an uncomfortably sharp insight into the Establishment. His thoughtful criticism never descends into meanness but is still too needle-sharp for comfort. Zacharia, therefore, deplores the media for its self-censorship. “There is no magazine in Kerala which will let me write 10 words against Mata Amritanandamayi. I told people at Malayala Manorama that in their eagerness to not look Christian-owned they have replaced the RSS daily Janmabhoomi.” His criticism can make aseptic ears bleed. At the festival he made audiences laugh and gasp as he blandly condemned both the Left and the Right as humourless dogma. “The people of Kerala have been cheated and denied by religion and by the state. Mata Amritanandamayi is like a black hole sucking in people because they need to hope, they need to dream”. In “An End to Third-rate Literature”, he had once anatomised the literary world, too. An untalented Christian writer makes a deal with the devil to sabotage his brilliant Ezhava rival, the Indian army shoots at the devil and high-jinks ensue.
Other Zacharia stories are far more spare. “I try to make sure no two stories sound alike.” Zacharia is a strong believer in writing as hard-won craft (as opposed to divine revelation). “Train Robbery”, about an extremely impoverished man and his young son who plan to rob a train, has made thousands of people cry, but Zacharia is non-committal.
Slender, elegant and dressed in black, Tash Aw, 34, seemed to be in uniform for the young male Asian writer. He reads excerpts from his Whitbread-awardwinning Harmony Silk Factory with elan. He handles interviews professionally. But Aw is also as unaffected as his book, which set out to shake up the stereotypes of the pink-gin-drinking ‘Malaya’ novels — the world of Somerset Maugham.
Aw tells the following anecdote with huge enjoyment. “When I was traveling with an English friend in Malaysia, she asked me why people in rural areas did not have gardens, when they are surrounded by such lush vegetation. I told her that we think of jungles as scary things that should be kept as far away as possible.”
“Even the name was a bit of a joke. You know, with words like ‘harmony’ and ‘silk’ there are certain automatic expectations, and then you have the discordant ‘factory’.” Aw’s novel introduces you to Johnny Lim through his son, who certainly thinks he’s terrifying. But other narrators blur the image and through it you learn about 1940s Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Aw says, race becomes a conversation only when there is no money. “The Chinese, Malays and Tamils have no problems living together. If there is a recession, then it’s all your fault, stop the immigrants.” It is, he says, much more of a problem than religion ever is. What about the radicalisation of Islam in Malaysia? “Well,” grins Aw, “our Muslims don’t do anyone any harm.”
A throwaway line in Harmony Silk Factory: “The only problem with being a communist… was that it interfered with business.” Globalisation and constant competition with Singapore continues to be a preoccupation in Malaysia. “Kuala Lumpur is not Malaysia. We are a messy people who like to walk about on the streets, eat and hang around chatting. Singapore is a tiny, tiny place. So you can control behaviour. The moment Singaporeans come across to Malaysia they are like everyone else: spitting, driving too fast. We Asians are a chaotic people. We just have to accept that.”
In life, as in fiction, Aw takes pleasure in repartee, stereotypes and incongruous images. Aw also enjoys himself at the expense of the liberal left. “They take political correctness to an extreme in England because they know they are capable of racism. Someone is describing an English cricketer to me. The tall guy, the curly haired guy… I asked, you mean the Pakistani guy? People were shocked. You can’t call him Pakistani! I said just because he is English does not mean he is not Pakistani. It is okay to be both.”
Aw loves and admires the independent films made in Malaysia. “Of course the authorities are constantly banning them. They don’t ban books because they are sure that no one reads.” Unlike in Indian cities where every Anglophone seems to be writing a novel, Aw says, Malaysia’s literary scene is still quiet. “We have over 90 percent literacy but the only books that sell are Sidney Sheldon and romance.” Aw began his book while working as a lawyer in London but is now a fulltime writer. “My parents are nice about my writing, but not quite sure what it all means. The one time they were really impressed was when they saw my name below VS Naipaul’s on an invitation to a talk in London.”
Jaishree Misra, author of bestselling books such as Ancient Promises, is the warmest and most easy-going in any flock of writers. At the 2008 Jaipur festival, Misra launched her novel about Rani Lakshmibai. A month later, back home in London, she was shocked to find Rani had kicked up a controversy. The book talks of a relationship between the Rani and a British officer. The Mayawati Government banned the book in UP after a furore in the Vidhan Sabha. “I kept watching the same news items every 25 minutes. It was numbing.” But Misra confides that seeing her sponge effigy being burnt was also mildly funny.
Misra has signed a three-book contract with Avon, an imprint of Harper- Collins UK. The first is Reunion, her first thriller, about four women who revisit their school 15 years after graduating. “It’s amazing that a British publisher is interested in a story about Delhi schoolgirls, but that’s the level of curiosity about India now. Anyone with a story to tell about India, now’s the time!”
She’s happy to talk about her methods. “I can’t do the Donna Tartt thing of taking eight years to write a book. I also have a fulltime job, which I enjoy, so I have to manage time. If I need to leave the house at 9:00 am, I calculate that I can be ready to go by 8:15 and squeeze in 45 minutes of writing. I work very fast. Because of years in journalism, I work well with deadlines.”
During the interview, Misra is distracted by designer and artist Aradhana Seth, floating by with a camera. Misra is fond of Aradhana and her sibling Vikram Seth, whom she lists as one of her favourite writers. The pair exchange anecdotes, including one in which Misra chased an iPod-cocooned Vikram Seth through London. “Poor man, I jumped on him asking for you,” giggles Misra. Misra makes fun of herself in a way that only people very sure of themselves can.
Though Misra isn’t a huge fan of the whodunnit, it seemed fun and challenging to try writing one. “For Reunion, I had to be careful about how much information I released at each stage. I used a method a colleague of mine who writes thrillers recommended. He uses a big board and uses dozens of post-its with bits of information. I find it a good method because you can move around the post-its to figure where you want to reveal what. There’s my tip for the day!”
Ask her about Taslima Nasreen, and 33-year-old Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam says, with careful poise, “I may not agree with everything she says, but I support her right to say it. She’s been very brave. I don’t know whether I could do what she has done.”
At Jaipur, Anam struck many as a writer who is unafraid to wear her political concerns on her sleeve, refusing to use irony as a crutch. “What we need is people to know that Bangladesh isn’t a basket-case. I am very aware of being published because I am a privileged member of an underprivileged nation. Not every writer is obliged to speak for her country but I feel I must.”
Anam is a vocal critic of Bangladesh’s religious right, but she will, with little prompting, remind you that Islam came to Bangladesh through the Sufi tradition. “On Poila Baishak, the Bengali New Year, there is singing, dancing, young girls came out on the streets. That’s Bangladesh too.”
While studying social anthropology at Harvard, Anam researched the Bangladesh war. Through her novel, A Golden Age, and in her journalistic writing, Anam reminds people of what she thinks of as a war the world has forgotten. Most Bangladeshis agree: the trial of war criminals was a key issue in the recent general election.
Anam says that Bangladesh is afraid to breathe in case the good fortune of the election results goes away. She writes frequently about the worry that her country will be swallowed by rising oceans, by military regimes, by fundamentalists, by poverty. But, she clarifies, “It’s only the middle class and the politicians who sit around despairing the country will never get better. You never hear people in villages saying that.”
One thing working for Bangladesh, Anam says, is the vision of NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank. “I can’t comment on their long-term effect, but NGOs have rolled out infrastructure while our political parties have just been focusing on each other.”
On the first evening of the festival, a candycoloured tent hosted one of its most memorable events. As part of the Writer’s Chain project (organised by the British Council and Siyahi), four poets from the UK had spent a week with four Indian authors, exploring each other’s work through translation.
The performance began with English poet Mathew Hollis reciting a poem written for a terminally-ill friend. Its rural imagery was picked up in hard, stony syllables by the celebrated Khasi poet Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. Nongkynrih proceeded to recite, in English, a translation of one of his own Khasi poems. “RK Narayan is dead,” began this most remarkable tribute to a mother, making the audience gasp with its affectionate ruthlessness. Tamil writer Sivasankari’s short story of a woman’s slow emancipation was translated into an Irish poem: Gearóid Mac Lochlainn exhorting Chandra, Chandra, now’s the time. Udaya Narayana Singh read in both Maithili and Bengali.
The final poem was jointly read by in English, in Irish and (by Sampurna Chattarji) in Bengali. Afterwards you walked around Diggi Palace yelling snatches of the poem. I am sick; Ami oshustho; Much of a muchness is too much for me
4 comments
anonandon says:
Feb 2, 2009
What?! Good grief, now that is luck by chance.
With that sight in mind, how can I ask you to get down to writing a movie review?
The Chasing Iamb says:
Feb 3, 2009
ooh mean mean anon.
anonandon says:
Feb 3, 2009
Moi? *plugs in halo* I haven’t the faintest what you’re talking about. *flutters poufy white wings*
portmanteau says:
Feb 8, 2009
whoa; i never see anything in the streets except chaat and aloo tikkis. gotta get ‘em priorities straight!